Black Coal, Thin Ice features ex-cop Zhang (Liao Fan) investigating the sudden appearance of human body parts in coal processing plants across China—a case which bears marked similarities to the unsolved murder investigation that ended his career years prior. The clues lead him to Wu Zhizhen (Gwei Lun-Mei), the widow of the first murder victim; as one might expect, It Gets Complicated.

I love noir,[1] and Black Coal, Thin Ice satisfies out of hand: anguished detectives, mysterious femme fatale, stylish lighting, dudes spitting watermelon seeds on the ground and sweating profusely. Left at that, one might be tempted to call describe this as a slavish devotion to the noir form—which might actually be true. (Again, I am probably a little more forgiving.)

But it injects these hallmarks[2] with its own twists, which keeps the movie surprising and suspenseful. Wu as the femme fatale is, of course, beautiful with a dangerous secret; but her role as scheme instigator is minimal (her present state, she reveals, being a kind of penance for past actions) and seems mostly like she just Wants Out. Zhang, too, is every bit an Archetypical Detective: angry, hopelessly alcoholic. The way his character arc plays out, however, doesn’t result in typical grim conviction; his internalization of events, tragic and otherwise, ends in something altogether more…manic.

To some extent, the plot gets rather convoluted, but I wonder how much “plot” was actually needed; of course it all ties back to the characters at some point, but I felt some fatigue watching so many diversions and red herrings and twists.[3] I did appreciate the subtlety with which some of these were delivered, though; e.g. Zhang finally does discover how exactly the murder victims’ corpses are discarded, which is obviously satisfying, but the moment also reveals how Profoundly Wrong Zhang had been re.: the suspects of his last investigation. This isn’t broadcast, really—Zhang doesn’t go out and chat with his cop buddies about how badly they screwed it up five years ago—but gets quietly folded up into the internal rage that propels him.

I loved the setting and sound. Set in a northern Chinese city during winter, locales range from snowy nighttime streets to factories to seedy upscale nightclubs to weirdly isolated outdoor skating rinks. Neon glares in through taxi windows; sounds of traffic and street bustle are relentless[4]; grimy snow covers everything.[5] While maybe all Chinese cities are kind of like this, I got the sense that Black Coal, Thin Ice’s setting is more like a near-future[6] conglomerate city[7] than[8] representative of any real place in particular; give it a few years, and it could stand in for Blade Runner’s cyberpunk Los Angeles.[9]

The audience at the screening I attended didn’t seem too keen on it, though; the movie isn’t without shortcomings. The plot, again, meanders for too long, and the quasi-romance between Wu and Zhang (it is a neo-noir, after all) is so quasi that I actually can’t tell if it’s actually supposed to be there. (Maybe that’s the point? Who knows!) But I submit that there is still an infallible metric for measuring the quality of a noir film, and that’s how much I want a cigarette afterwards; walking out of the theatre, you could have laced a whole pack with cyanide and I’d have smoked them all. Nothing soothes like a poison cigarette.

Or, anyway, I love thinking that I love neo-noir. It’s kind of like ‘80s movies; I don’t actually like them, but then I watch Drive (hey another neo-noir, kinda of), and for the next week I have nothing but (say) Hughie Lewis and the News on the brain. ↩